Video: Understanding tabs

This chapter is about tabs and tables, and this movie is specifically about tabs. Let's start off by looking at the different types of tabs. Frequently misunderstood, often a cause of frustration, but once you get the hang of them they are really rather straightforward. So when you insert a Tab Stop using your keyboard, notice I have my hidden characters shown, so I can see where those tab stops are. You never want more than one consecutive tab because you can just set the position of the one tab that you have and these are the four main types of tab, Left, Center, Right, and Decimal, and each of these four types of tab are aligned in this case to the same point, and this is the result that you get.

Explore the numerous type options, type-related features, and type-specific preferences of Adobe InDesign. Using practical, real-world examples, instructor and designer Nigel French dissects the anatomy of a typeface and defines the vocabulary of typography. The course moves from the micro to the macro level, addressing issues such as choosing page size, determining the size of margins, adjusting number columns, and achieving a clean look with baseline grids. This course takes you from laying out a page to delving into the hows and whys of typography.

Topics include:

Understanding text threads and text flow methods in InDesign

Using Copy and Paste vs. Place

Choosing and combining typefaces

Understanding leading and how it relates to type size and column width

Comparing points, picas, and ems

Learning the proper use of white space and break characters

Understanding the finer points of kerning and tracking

Working with punctuation, special characters, ornaments, and ligatures

Understanding tabs

This chapter is about tabs and tables, and this movie is specifically about tabs.Let's start off by looking at the different types of tabs.Frequently misunderstood, often a cause of frustration, but once you get the hangof them they are really rather straightforward.So when you insert a Tab Stop using your keyboard, notice I have my hiddencharacters shown, so I can see where those tab stops are.You never want more than one consecutive tab because you can just set theposition of the one tab that you have and these are the four main types of tab,Left, Center, Right, and Decimal, and each of these four types of tab arealigned in this case to the same point, and this is the result that you get.

If I put my cursor in this text frame and come to the Type menu and choose Tabs,I get a Tab Ruler above my text frame.Now if I am lucky that Tab Ruler exactly aligns with my text frame.If forever reason it doesn't, maybe it looks like this, slightly offset, you canclick on the magnet, and it will snap back to align with the text frame.If that doesn't work, then close the Tab Ruler and change your view size to 100%or 200%, and it should work that.

So here we see the left-hand tab, so to insert that, I just clicked on theruler, making sure I am clicking on a left-hand tab and then drag that overwherever it is I want it to go.Next up, Center tab looks slightly different, just above the ruler, and theright-hand tab, and finally the Decimal tab. And the Decimal tab, when you inserta decimal, or indeed it could be any character perhaps you want to align to acurrency symbol, like a dollar sign or a pound sign, that's the point at whichthe character is aligned, and here we have just a diagram of the Tab Ruler.

As well as the more obvious uses of tabs there are some unexpected uses and acouple of different types of tabs that I have yet to mention, and one of thoseis the Right Indent Tab, and we see that right here, that's what it's hiddencharacter looks like, the purpose of the Right Indent Tab is just to shuntover whatever text is to the right of the cursor, to the right-hand edge of the text frame.Shift+Tab will insert a Right Indent Tab.You can also go to it in your Insert Special Character > Other > Right Indent Tab.

Another usage of the Right Indent Tab is when you are setting up a folio for amagazine or any other type of publication where you want to have both flush leftand flush right on the same line for an easy way of achieving that.As well as setting the position of the type, you can also fill in the spacebetween the Tab Stop and its position with a particular character.This is an old trick to create some sort of reply form.

Now if you feel that the underlines, or underscores, are too heavy, then you canuse an alternative approach, and that's what I have used down here, I'll show youthat in just a moment.But to get the result that we have in the top example, I am going to press myTab shortcut, Command+Shift+T. Now we can see that I have a right tab specifiedat the right edge of the text frame and then in the Leader field I have typed inan Underscore so that the space between the text and the Tab Stop is filledin with an underscore.

Now down here in this second example, where the underscore, or the rule, is alot lighter in weight, that's achieved in a slightly different way, that'sactually achieved using a nested style, so if we look at the tabs here, youcan see I have the right tab in the same position, but there is no Leader character involved.What is involved is a Character Style.So I have set up a Character Style, I've called it line, let's just go and look at its properties.In the properties of this line character style I have edited the UnderlineOptions where I have changed the Offset, and I have changed the Weight.

Now to incorporate that into this Paragraph Style, I have created a Nested Style.I will be talking about those more in the chapter on Paragraph Styles.But right here in Drop Caps and Nested Styles we can see that this is howthis effect is achieved.I have no Character Style applied up to 1 Tab Character and the Tab Characteryou can see inserted right there.Thereafter, I have that line Character Style through 1 Tab Character.

Now in this case, the through is not going to matter too much, that could be anumber of different delimiters and still get the same result, but on this thirdline, where we have three different pieces of information on the same line, thenwe need to go one step further, this is a separate Paragraph Style based on thefirst one that we saw, and this in addition to the None through 1 Tab Characterand then the line Character Style, we have this option Repeat, and that justrepeats, in this case, the last two styles so that we can have the rule betweenState and Zip and between Zip and the end of the line.

So it's just an alternative approach to a reply coupon, which if you have tomake them are not that much fun, but they are necessary, so rather than usingtab leaders, using a Character Style.All right, back on to tab leaders though and other instances of tab leaders.You see them frequently used in price lists to separate the text and the priceitself to fill in the space, and in this case, I click on my tab--they arerather fiddly these tabs-- but there it is right there.

If we click on that, you can see it's slightly highlighted in blue toindicate that it's selected.In the Leader field, I have typed not just one period,but a period followed by a space, just to space out those dots, a bit more, whichis how I prefer them.And of course this can then be incorporated into a Paragraph Style.When editing tabs, it's certainly possible to edit them through yourParagraph Style Options, but I tend to find that the Ruler that you are givenhere, doesn't give you much flexibility and also you can't align it over the text frame.

So for that reason, if I am changing anything about tabs that are incorporatedinto a Paragraph Style I prefer to do it like this.So let's say that I would like to bring that Tab Stop in a fraction,Command+Shift+T to go to my Tab Ruler, which we can see is not actuallyaligning with my text.So I will try the magnet that doesn't work, I will close that, I will switch toa different view size, I'll go back to my Tab Ruler, and now it does.

So let's say I want to bring these in a fraction, I will make the change to thatone instance right there which is going to cause this Paragraph Style called tableaders to be overwritten, i.e.there is something about is that is not in the style definition.Now I actually want to incorporate that into the style definitions.So I will right-click and then choose Redefine Style and then all of theinstances of that Paragraph Style will be updated.So that's just on a side really on how to work with tabs once they have beenincorporated into a Paragraph Style definition.

One more instance of a Tab Leader, and we see it very frequently, is its usage ina table of contents, and we have that right here and here it's being used topush out the page entry to the right-hand edge of the text frame.And while this is very common, it may not necessarily be the best solutionbecause it does two things that may be less than desirable and those arethere is an awful lot of distance between the entry and its page number so itmay be difficult for the eye to track along the page, and secondly it opens upsome rather unfortunate white space, even though in this case that white spaceis filled with dots between the entry and the page number, and that's going tovery quite a lot, so here it's very short and up here it's very long.

So as an alternative to dot leaders in table of contents, you might considerinstead separating the entry from the page number with nothing more than an emspace, and if I now turn on my Guides, we can see the hidden character rightthere for an em space so that's quite a lot larger than a regular space, and Iwould say in many ways that's a preferable solution.

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A: We added 18 new movies, primarily in the "Using Typekit" and "Type Treatments and Effects" chapters. These movies describe new and enhanced typography features in the latest release of InDesign CC, and are indicated by the "(CC 2014.1)" tag in their names.

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